The Harry Potter series has been a publishing phenomenon, but just exactly how many books have been sold?

It’s very difficult to establish exactly how many Harry Potter books have been sold across the world, as different websites will give you different information. According to Wikipedia, which generally is pretty reliable, the book series has been translated into 67 different languages, and the last four books have set records for the speed and number of sales.

So how many copies have actually been sold? Well, also according to Wikipedia, as of June 2008, over 400 million copies had been sold. That is enough to put the books end to end and they’d travel from here to Saturn and back. Okay, so you got me, that last statistic is totally made up, but I bet if you did put all the books end to end they would go a heck of a long way. But let’s face it, no one is going to do that, that would require breaking into the homes of 400 million people and taking all their Harry Potter books, and I for one keep my Harry Potter books in a big steel vault, two miles beneath the earth.

Or you could just do a simple equation to take the length of the book and then times that by 400 million. Say a book is thirty centimeters long, then that is 30 centimeters times 400 million, which is 12 billion centimeters, or 120 million meters, or 75,000 miles. The circumference of the earth is only 25,000 miles, so that’s three times all the way round, and keep in mind she would have sold a bucket load of books since then too, probably got round the world again by now.

But you get the idea, it’s a lot of books. I wish I could write like J.K., then I would be here writing articles about it, I’d be sailing my yacht around the world with Emma Watson as my deck hand.

Thanks for reading. Here are some of my other Potterific articles below. I’m trying to build up a big collection because I love the series, and I’ll be doing lots more cool Harry Potter facts.